Thursday, September 8, 2011

Video Game Corner: Jaws Unleashed (2006)

Seems like a pretty fun concept for a game, doesn't it? Getting to play as the gigantic, man-eating great white shark in Jaws and stalking the ocean around Amity Island, attacking anyone and anything that gets in your way, destroying boats and eating animals and people alike. It sounds like a fun game. When I saw this game at a store one day, I couldn't believe it. I'd heard that there was a Jaws game being developed but I expected it to be a game where you'd play Brody and try to kill the shark. When I realized that you play the shark, I knew I had to play this. Eventually, I got a Playstation 2 (which I didn't have until Christmas of 2006) and a few games, this being one of them. When I finally played the game, it was fun being the shark... at first. But then, as you go through the various missions and spend your time attacking people, it loses its luster fairly quick. I eventually stopped because I was getting confused on one level but I recently went back and finished it and I can now say, without a shadow of a doubt, that this game isn't very good.

The storyline for the game is that Amity Island is expanding in its economy by making connections with wealthy corporations who are building industrial factories like drilling platforms, underwater facilities and the like in and around the island. With the Fourth of July coming up, the amount of tourists on the island is swelling as well. However, all this activity attracts an enormous great white shark (i.e. you) to the island as well. As you progress through the stages of the game and cause more havoc throughout the island, the cutscenes create a familiar scenario: local biologist Michael Brody (who acts more like Matt Hooper than any relative of Roy Scheider's character) continually tries to warn the greedy mayor that opening the beaches with the shark prowling around would be disastrous but he refuses to listen to him at every turn, providing more cannon fodder for you to kill and destroy.

After the opening tutorial and first real level, the game's layout becomes similar to the Grand Theft Auto games: you have a free-roaming mode where you can simply swim around Amity Island, attacking people, animals, and watercraft at your whim. You use the map-screen to see where your next mission is located and you can swim there whenever you're ready to do so. The shark (which is actually called "Jaws") has a menu of upgrades that you can access from both the main menu and Pause screen. In order to buy upgrades, you have to earn points by completing missions, destroying boats and eating people in either mode of play, collecting bonus items, or completing the many side-missions strewn throughout the free-roaming mode. You can upgrade five different aspects of the shark: power (the amount of damage you can cause when attacking), speed, hunger (how long you can go without food), accuracy, and health. There are save points throughout the free-roaming level that you can use to save the upgrades that you acquire. Besides your standard health meter, you also have a hunger meter. When your hunger meter starts to go down, that means you have to eat something because your health will start diminish. Naturally, your health also diminishes whenever you take damage. You have a variety of attacks: biting (of course), ramming things with your snout, and a tail whip. You also have a stealth attack that I was never able to pull off properly, mainly because I don't think the game instructed me well on how to pull it off. As you get more upgrades, you can acquire more attacks like a "corkscrew" charge where you spin while charging and the body-bomb, where you leap out of the water at a boat and do a body slam (I've never been able to pull this off successfully).

As I said, the game is fun at first but after a while, the repetitive nature sets in. There are only so many times you can swim around Amity in the free-roaming stage and attack all the swimmers, water-skiers, sea animals, boats and so on before it gets old fast. The missions aren't much better. I'll go into greater detail about them shortly but for the most part, they're either repetitive, ridiculously easy, or cruelly hard. As for the side-missions, I've only done a few because they're not fun and the game is overly snippy about how you must do them. One that was fun to do was a mission where a helicopter is trying to rescue some drowning swimmers and your task is to destroy it before it can do so. This was well done and referenced back to a scene in Jaws 2 where the shark destroys a helicopter trying to rescue the trapped teenagers. Other than that, the side-missions were nothing special and were mainly lame mini-games. If you didn't know where you were allowed to go and where you weren't, you could easily swim outside the "playing range" of the mission, ending it. Other missions sometimes didn't specify where you were supposed to go to do what you needed. One mission involved you having to kill a water-skier before he could complete a jump. I didn't see any water-skier anywhere around and suddenly a message saying that I failed the mission because the skier made the jump came up. Maybe if you'd shown me where I was supposed to go, I wouldn't have failed! There were also three levels to each side-mission but they were just varying degrees of difficulty for the same challenge.

The game also has its share of control, camera, and graphic problems. You have to hold down a button in order to swim but there were plenty of points in the game where I would be moving and would stop to look around but when I would push the button, the shark wouldn't move and I would have to press the button again for some reason. This would become really annoying in boss battles or levels where there were a lot of enemies and would often get me killed. It was also very easy to get stuck, either between to objects or just when I brushed up against one object in particular for some reason. There was one instance where I got stuck in a weird limbo sort of position and I eventually had to reset from my last save point because I couldn't fix the problem. In some stages, the sonar on your HUD would prove to be not as useful as it should be. Your objective is always marked by a red circle on the sonar and points of interest, like items that could help you in a battle, were green blocks. You'd think to get to where you needed to go, you would just until the marker on the sonar that indicated you would reach the aforementioned object right? Normally, this is the case but the sonar doesn't tell you everything. For one, in areas where there long drops downward that you had to swim or where the surface is very high above you, you have no way of knowing if the object is up near the top or below you. Your marker on the sonar could be right on top of the objective but you still wouldn't know if you need to go up or down. It's also frustrating in levels where you're swimming through a series of tunnels and you're going by the sonar when you hit a wall that's not indicated at all on the sonar and you have to go around it. Bottom line, a map layout would have been a lot more helpful.

The camera is really annoying as well. The transitions between above and below the surface of the water are the worst. There were so many times when I dove under the surface but it took the camera far longer than necessary to follow me. Also, the camera would often switch to above the surface when I didn't want it to. There were many times where I would get very close to the surface but not entirely break it and yet the camera would suddenly go above it. This is not something I needed when I was trying to turn around and face something that was attacking me. Speaking of turning, the camera often gets in bad spots off to the side of the shark instead of being directly behind it, making it difficult to see what I'm turning to face. There's a button you can press to make the camera go directly behind you but it often doesn't stay that way, causing you to be constantly battling it. You also turn really slow, leaving you open to attack. The graphics are constantly glitching up. The frame-rate sometimes gets really slow, objects glitch on and off the screen when they shouldn't, and when doing the jumps out of the water to attack ships, the camera would suddenly go crazy and get stuck in weird positions. So, yeah, this game is bugged up the ass. I've heard that the PC version didn't have as many glitches though.

Your health bar is a joke. It's fairly long and you can upgrade it to bigger sizes but the problem is that it's way too easy to lose a lot of health very quickly. The health goes down rather quickly, even when the attack shouldn't have damaged you that much, and there are some enemies that attack you so quickly that you sometimes can't see them. Also, enemies that shouldn't be that much of a threat like people on boats shooting at you or various sea creatures like dolphins and smaller sharks can drain your health so quickly that it's incredibly frustrating. In the first mission of the game, there's a moment where you come across a bunch of piranhas and these little bastards can drain your health so quickly that it's almost like instant death. Animals like dolphins can kill you very easily too. This is ridiculous! I'm a huge great white shark and freaking dolphins and seals are killing me? I wasn't going to kill these animals when I first started playing but when they kept killing, I just said "To hell with it" and slaughtered them. That's another thing: eating and restoring health is a lot more difficult than it should be.You have to grab something, hold the button, and then shake the control stick back and forth to shred it apart to kill it and eat it. Chewing it by pressing the "bite" button doesn't work that well and when holding a victim in its mouth, the shark will sometimes let it go for no reason. It sometimes feels like you can't kill and eat things fast enough to make up for the damage you're taking. Killing divers is the worst because you usually have to bite and shake them two to three times to kill them and when they don't die, they keep shooting harpoons at you, depleting what health you got back. It may sound like I'm being too nitpicky but this game really does have a lot of frustrating problems.

Besides your sonar, you can also switch over to "shark vision", a mode where all enemies and special objects glow so you can see them better. You can also lock onto enemies in order to focus on killing one in particular at a time. But, like a lot of aspects of this game, this doesn't work nearly as well the game would like you to think it does. While you can lock onto a specific enemy, locking onto the one you want to is really difficult because there are times where you'll try to lock onto one right in front of you and the shark vision will target one that's fifteen to twenty-feet away. Also, the ways you're expected to use the shark vision is preposterous and no rational person would ever think to use it in this way. The shark vision not only highlights food but also specific objects that can aid you in your missions. For instance, there's a mission that begins with you in front of an underwater minefield and your shark vision which mines you can destroy without setting off the whole field which results in instant death. However, since I'm playing a shark and not Superman, I didn't think to turn on my shark vision because sharks don't have X-ray vision and, logically, can't see the difference between a dangerous mine and a not so dangerous mine. I know this is a game but that leap in logic is something no one in their right mind would think to do unless they read a walkthrough ahead of time or something.

The graphics and AI of the human characters are really flawed as well. There are some major cutscenes that look decent but the majority of them have really bad character animation with no facial expressions and hardly any body movements whatsoever. (The voice acting is also pretty bad.) The main story of the game features characters that try to tie it to the movies, like having a character named Michael Brody, who, as I said, is more like a substitute for Hooper than Roy Scheider and there's even a shark hunter who's a blatant ripoff of Quint (his fishing boat is named the Orca II for God's sake). There's also a character named Shaw (no explanation needed). While it's cool that they tried to make a connection to the films, the laughable acting, bad character animation, and ridiculous nature of some of the missions make it feel like a mockery than a tribute. Also, the human characters that you can actually attack just say the same stuff over and over again, usually, "Never going to make it!" or "Where is it?!" or simply, "Shark!" It gets old very quick, like everything else in this game.

The music in the game is pretty bad too. The main theme is an uninspired version of the legendary shark theme and there are bits and pieces of John Williams' score strewn throughout the game as well. While it is close to swim and attack people to that awesome music, the bits are really brief and most of the music is generic and unoriginal. The music that plays during the free-roaming level whenever you attack is particularly uninspired. Since this game is backed by Universal, I don't see why they couldn't have just used the majority of the scores from the movies but whatever.

Before we get to the missions, one more general aspect of the game I have to comment on is the bonus items. These come in the form of license plates or tin-cans you see sitting in random parts of both types of levels which give you points to get upgrades. Fair enough. However, what's really dumb is what you get if you acquire them all. I can't remember which one it is but if you get either all the license plates or tin-cans, you win a selection of clips from the movie Jaws. Um, yeah, that's not incentive for me to bust my butt to collect all of these things. Why? Because Jaws is a really famous movie that you can easily get and if I want to watch the movie, I'll just watch the movie! That's why it always annoys me when movie-licensed games feature clips from the movie they're based on but making said movie clips a special feature they expect you to torture yourself trying to unlock is just redundant.

Now for the missions. I'll go through each one and talk about particularly interesting or frustrating aspects of them (most will be the latter). Before we begin, let me just say that some aspects of these missions are really stupid to put in a Jaws game. Some objectives feel more appropriate for a James Bond game and I feel really stupid trying to do this stuff as a shark.

The Break Out: This first stage is a lot like Jaws 3: you're captured and put on display in a high-tech SeaWorld style amusement park and your objective is to escape. Right off the bat, they prove my point about having dumb objectives that don't feel appropriate for this type of game. Your first objective is to grab a scientist, hold him in your mouth, bring him over to a card-reader next to the water and doing so activates the underwater gate you need to swim out of. See what I mean? I'm a shark and I have to use a scientist's ID card to get out of my holding tank. Even during my first time playing, I was thinking, "This is ridiculous." The third section is where you run into this school of piranhas that can kill you too easily. That is so frustrating because you have to charge a jammed door in order to get to the next part of the level but the piranhas won't leave you alone long enough to do so and you have swim away from them or they'll kill you. Once again, I'm a big shark and a bunch of piranhas are able to kill me. Really stupid. In the last section, you fight a killer whale. This fight is very underwhelming because all he does is swim clockwise around the tank without changing direction once and all you have to do is either charge or bite him and keep doing so until he's dead. Don't let him get behind you, though, or you're in for it. Really dull first boss battle.

Dead of Night: The objective here is to destroy a refinery that's polluting the water. First you have to get past an electrified fence by chomping the batteries that are on either side of it. Because of the controls, I would always accidentally touch the fence and set off the alarm. It didn't result in failing the mission but it did make things a little more difficult. After getting through the fence and eating some swimmers to advance to the next section, you have to avoid these searchlights or you get shot. You can destroy a dock where a sniper is standing but I had search a hard time doing that for some reason because I kept getting killed. I don't know if it was by him or someone else but it was frustrating. The last part of the mission is grabbing these explosive barrels people are dumping in the water and spitting them at a certain pipe in order to destroy it. Other than people shooting at me, I never found it that difficult to spit a barrel at the mouth of the pipe and destroy it utterly.

Hunted: This is basically a rehash of the previous mission. You have to remove batteries (three this time), avoid spotlights, and, once again, your main objective is to destroy something by spitting explosive barrels at it. Did the game designers just get lazy and decide to redo the previous level, only beef it up in terms of busywork? Anyway, there are a bunch of mini-sub-like things here that will plague you throughout the rest of the game. They are so annoying with how they shoot torpedoes at you, constantly killing you just when you're about the complete your objective. There were so many times when I was about to spit a barrel at the large tank you're supposed to destroy when I would suddenly die because I got hit by a torpedo. Of course, you can destroy these crafts all you want but they'll still respawn. Also in the first section are a bunch of boats patrolling the surface with dragging nets that you have to be careful not to get caught in. I don't know if it results in instant death or not because I never got caught but I imagine you want to avoid those nets as best as you can. Not a hard level overall but really annoying.

Predator in the Bay: This is where I began to get fed up with the game's difficulty and glitches. First, you have to destroy two diving cages and eat the divers. I've already told you what they do if you don't kill them right away but that's the least of your worries here. After dealing with them, you have to destroy three oil platforms but before you can do that, you have to destroy four turrets on each platform. This is where your shark vision comes in handy because still active turrets have spotlights shimmering through the water when you active the vision. After doing so, you have to go back to the sunken submarine where the diving cages were, grab a torpedo from a pile on the ocean floor, swim back to the oil rig, and hit two of its pillars with the torpedoes in order to destroy it. You have to repeat this process for the other two but that's not the annoying part. There are a bunch of dolphins here that will attack you the minute they see you and I got killed so many times by these little assholes just when I was about to complete this section!

The second part of this level has you swim into another section of the area and into the main power supply of the facility controlling the oil platforms. Once inside, you have to destroy two pillars while avoiding this big fan in the middle of the room (which is really difficult because the thing keeps sucking you towards it and you're constantly fighting the controls). Once you have done so, you have to go back out the way you came and this is where I ran into an annoying glitch. Just as I got out, I died due to a low health bar and a lack of food but getting out triggered the next cutscene. After that, I figured I had to go back in this room and repeat the process since I died but I found that the door to the room wouldn't open when I smashed the bars. Not only that but you're supposed to fight a boss in the last part of the level but it wouldn't show up because I guess the game got confused when my death screen and the next cutscene came up one after the other and didn't know what to do. I had no choice but to reload my last checkpoint and try the whole mission over again. That about tore it for me but I decided to persevere so I could at least say I beat the game.

Fighting the boss was difficult for me but not for the usual reason. The boss is an enormous boat that movies into the harbor. You can attack it with your ramming and biting but it would take forever so the best course of action is to use those torpedoes again and this is where the problem started. When I was destroying the oil rigs, I could get as close to the rig as I wanted in order to shoot the torpedoes but during this fight, I had to stay away from the boat otherwise the explosion from the torpedo would kill me instantly. Trying to line up a shot while staying a safe distance was hard enough but the constantly moving boat just made it even harder and the lack of consistency in how close you could get to an object with a torpedo was annoying. (And those dolphins once again plagued me to no end here!)

The Angry Armada: There's nothing to this level except destroying a bunch of boats that are trying to kill you. Destroying the boats isn't that difficult but they're once again dragging nets so you have to be careful. Here, I did get caught in the nets a few times and you have to rock the control stick back and forth to escape, draining your health before you could do so. There are plenty of animals to eat in order to regain your health and this section wasn't too hard. The boss, a big coastguard ship, was a little more difficult. First off, those little mini-sub things show up again and constantly blast you with torpedoes, often killing you just as you're about to succeed. The way to destroy the boss is to grab the orange mines it drops that don't explode and throw them back at it. The difficult part is that it takes a lot of hits to destroy the boss (sometimes its health bar doesn't go down even when you score a direct hit) and the mines you can use are strewn so far from each other that you often get killed while trying to grab them.

A Taste for Blood: This level is divide into two sections, one being very frustrating and the other being enjoyable. The first section involves you having to navigate through an underwater minefield, destroying certain mines that won't set off the entire field  that you can see by using your shark vision. You have to destroy these mines by spitting barrels at them but staying a reasonable distance from them so as not to take damage from the explosion. The barrels have a tendency to either fly right over the mine (sometimes hitting another mine in the background, setting off the whole field and killing you instantly) or almost get to it but then hang above it for some reason and explode when it feels like it, usually when you've gone to get another barrel because you think you've messed up. To make matters even worse, swimming through the gaps without touching the other mines is so hard. I swear the entire field went off at points when I was sure that I didn't touch a mine. Also, no matter how careful you are, you're going to take damage and getting food is a problem because these seals that swim around will often lead you into the mines when you try to bite them. Also, killing one often results in its brethren attacking you and you're defenseless because you can't move around much due to the cramped quarters. (One last note: the cutscene before this level involves a drunk idiot getting himself blown up and the first thing you hear is him laughing like an idiot. This game is good enough to allow you to skip cutscenes but I got killed so often that I heard this moron's drunk laughter so many times that I about went nuts.)

Now, the second section of this level is quite enjoyable. It involves you hunting down four injured divers whose blood trails you followed into this little cove. Finding their hiding spots and getting to them is actually quite rewarding and makes you wish the game had more levels like this (in fact, this is what the majority of the game should have been instead of these dumb 007-style missions). One diver takes refuge on a piece of floating debris and you simply have to destroy it and eat him. The trickiest one is hiding in a sunken that has two cracks on either side of it. Approaching him and biting scares him from one side to the other and you have to quickly swim around and get in the section in-between sides that you can fit into in order to attack him. Another diver is hiding amongst a pile of debris and all you have to do is charge the debris and follow him while charging to flush him out so you can get him (you have to destroy some nearby mines before you can do this though). And finally, there's one that involves you simply entering a pipe and smashing some debris.

The Deep: This time, you swim around the tunnels of a big mining rig deep below the surface of the ocean and destroy four power generators. The first difficult aspect of this one is an awful hazard that lies at each entrance to one of the four pipes leading into the cliff: boulders that get sucked down into the pipe. You have to wait for these boulders to come by before swimming into the tunnel because if you don't, they'll catch you out nine times out of ten. Getting caught by them means instant death because you get sucked down to a grinder. Navigating and turning in the cramped tunnels is difficult because of the less than perfect camera controls and it's very easy to get lost. I think all the tunnels in the cliff walls are connected but after destroying one generator, I would always swim back out and just go to the other entrances outside. This is one level where your sonar can really hinder you because it doesn't show any walls in your way. Finally, one tunnel has connections to all the generators and it can difficult to remember which ones you've destroyed and which you haven't when picking a direction to follow. Not the hardest level overall but it can be confusing.

The Facility: The first part of this level is a battle with a giant squid in a large tank. This has to be the most annoying boss battle in the entire game. First, the squid is constantly swatting at you with its two longest tentacles, which are almost impossible to avoid bumping into and every once in a while, it'll smack you hard enough to where you take damage. Second, its most damaging attack is one where it lunges at you. You have to get out of the way as quick as you can and if it gets you in your tentacles, you have to jiggle the control stick like mad to get loose and it takes a lot of health. It wouldn't be so bad if the camera controls didn't suck so much. You can't keep the squid in front of you long enough to wait for it to charge and when you see it coming, you usually can't get out of the way in time. Third, the area where you're battling is really cramped, with the squid taking up half of it, so there's not a lot of room to move around and avoid the attacks (this also makes the camera suck even more so). Fourth, you have to tear off the squid's tentacles. After you bite a tentacle off, you should be able to chomp on it later when you need health but I found that every time I tried to approach a tentacle to chomp it, it would go flying off and I would lose my chance to get health. Another annoying game glitch. Finally, there's the final part of the battle. After you've torn off all but the squid's longest tentacles and both its eyes, you have to lure it into charging into the electrified pipes on the sides of the wall. You have to do this four times and there were so many times where I died just before I could finish the squid off. My best advice is to just keep swimming around in a circle and eventually, the squid will slam itself into the pipes four times.

The other part of the level isn't as bad. You have to destroy another generator, flood a control room, and then kill the owner of the facility before he kills you (this last challenge is timed and you only have two minutes). The only difficult part up until the final battle is killing and eating all the divers that can damage you. During the final battle, you first have to take out two underwater craft that shoot torpedoes at you and then get the owner, who moves like a bullet. You have to be careful not to get caught in-between the tanks in the room because he'll sometimes lure you there. It's not that hard a fight, though (certainly not as annoying as that damn squid!).

Blood on the Beach: This is simply a couple of timed challenges. First, you have to kill five swimmers before they get to shore. This should be simple but some of these people just won't go down no matter how many times you attack them. The game is good enough to tell you when a person is dead but there were so many times where I was able to kill two to three people when everyone else would make it to shore and I would fail the mission. Maybe I just suck, I don't know. The second part challenge occurs when you use explosive barrels to blow a hole in an electrified net to enter an inlet. You have fifty seconds to destroy five boats here. I found this to be much easier than the first challenge, mainly because it's easier to destroy boats (for me, anyway). The third part of the mission is a boss battle with the mayor's yacht. You can't just simply chomp and charge the boat like before. Here, you actually have to push the boat into the barges in the pond until its energy bar goes down. Despite the yacht's high speed, it's not hard to complete this mission. The only difficulty is healing yourself after you get shot constantly by the snipers on the barges and then getting back to attacking the yacht.

The Final Chase: The last level is really just a final boss battle, this time against Brody and the Quint-esque shark hunter on the Orca II. It doesn't take much to destroy the boat but this is still difficult. First, the cutscene shows Brody fire a homing device on the shark and during the fight, if you swim too far from the boat, the device explodes and kills you instantly. To add to the difficulty, those annoying underwater crafts are out in full force here and respawn ridiculously fast. You'll die a lot of times right when you're about to destroy the boat because of those damn things and their torpedoes. The water surface is also really choppy, making it difficult to keep your head above water so you can see what you're doing. With a little perseverance, you will eventually win but the ending cinematic does make it feel like you've accomplished anything. All it does is show a helicopter finding the wreckage of the boat and dropping a bomb hoping to kill. The last shot is of your dorsal fin following the helicopter back to Amity. Big whoop.

Jaws Unleashed is a cool idea of a game but the execution is lackluster. The gameplay is repetitive and downright annoying at times, the controls are awkward, the camera is constantly fighting you, and you get killed far more often than you should. I never played the Jaws game for the NES back in the day but I have seen playthroughs of it and while this does have more to do, it doesn't seem like that much of an improvement. It's just a frustrating, annoying Grand Theft Auto wannabe that doesn't live up to the promise of its licensed source material. I only recommend it for the curious and trust me, if you don't have a lot of patience, you'll get sick of it pretty quick as I did initially.

No comments:

Post a Comment